If everyone could turn to Hebrews 11:1-4:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.
We are going to take a look at saving faith, as the Bible discusses it. Then also, if we have time, we are going to take a look at Abel in the book of Genesis, as he is given here as the very first example of someone who had faith and who demonstrated faith in their life.
In Hebrews 11:1, we read a very insightful verse, as God says:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for…
“Faith is the substance.” Again and again through this chapter, we read “faith,” “faith,” “faith,” “By faith Abraham,” “By faith Noah.” I did not count the total number of times that it is mentioned, but it is mentioned a great number of times in Hebrews 11.
As we are looking into the Bible and we read about faith, we have come to learn that if faith has to do with salvation, it is pointing to the Lord Jesus Christ and not man’s faith. It is not your faith or my faith or any person’s faith that is involved with saving a sinner, and we know that faith is involved with saving a sinner because God tells us, “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves.”
With this statement, God is letting us know that when we are discussing salvation and saving faith, it has nothing to do with man but it is actually the faith of Christ, the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. He is faith Himself.
Some people find this hard to understand and hard to acknowledge, yet the Bible tells us that Jesus says of Himself that He is Truth. He is The Truth. He is Righteousness. “God is love,” the Bible says.
All of these attributes are actually names for God. They are what God is in His very essence, in His very Being. He is Love. He is Truth. He is Faith. Christ is Wisdom. Proverbs 8 personifies Wisdom, and it is pointing to the Lord Jesus Christ.
Many theologians and teachers in churches and congregations throughout the centuries have kind of reserved faith and said, “No, God is not faith.” They do this even though the Bible says that He is “Faithful and True” in Revelation 19. They believe, “No, when God is talking about salvation, it is your faith that He is talking about. You have to exercise your faith. You have to make a decision. You have to choose Christ. You have to believe in God, and that will bring salvation to you.”
But this is wrong; it is wrong. If they are trying to get saved by doing the “work of faith,” that will never bring salvation to anyone.
What is faith? Actually, it is better to ask, Who is faith? Faith is Christ. For instance, in the Epistle of Jude, which is right before Revelation, we read in Jude 1:3:
Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.
You see, God is speaking about “the faith,” because there is really only “one faith” and that is Christ. He is saying that it was “once delivered.” It was “once delivered,” which rules out all kinds of things. It narrows it down as to who we can say faith is or what we can say faith is.
Faith is not anything that has been handed down through the centuries, so it is not the tradition of our fathers. Faith is not a certain kind of teaching. Faith has nothing to do with that, but it is that “which was once delivered.”
When we check this out and when we search through the Bible, we find that Jesus was “once delivered” for the sins of His people. In the last couple of verses of Hebrews 9, God makes a point of emphasizing that Jesus was sacrificed “once.” He was sacrificed one time. He did not have to be often sacrificed for the sins of His people, but only once was Jesus delivered unto Pontius Pilate. Only once did He go to the Cross, and He was delivered for the saints, for all of God’s elect. He was delivered for us, those who are counted as His people.
In Jude 1:3, God is telling us and identifying who “the faith” is, so when we come to Hebrews 11:1, we read:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for…
Actually, as we go through the whole chapter, we can just substitute the name of Christ or the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now Christ is the substance of things hoped for…
Is this not a true statement! He embodies everything that we hope for, because our whole salvation is wrapped up in the Lord Jesus Christ. Salvation is not “hoped for” in any other way. “For there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” So “faith is the substance” or “Christ is the substance of things hoped for.”
Actually, the word “substance” is a word that is translated as “confidence” most of the time; as in, we have “confidence” in something. This is translated as “confidence” most of the time, except in one other place. Back in Hebrews 1, this word “substance” is found, but it is not translated as “substance” or as “confidence.” It is translated in Hebrews 1:3, where it is referring to the Son, the Lord Jesus:
Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person…
“Person” is the same word as “substance” that is in Hebrews 11:1. This is referring to Christ who is “the express image” of God. The word “person” is translated instead of what we find in Hebrews 11:1 as “substance,” so we could say:
Now faith is the Person of things hoped for…
Or
Now Christ is the Person of things hoped for…
This just verifies even more that we are not looking at some kind of a feeling or that someone has to muster up some kind of spiritual belief of any kind, but really saving faith has to do with a Person who is Jesus. He is the salvation of His people.
It goes on in Hebrews 11:1:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
We believe. We believe the Bible. We believe all that the Bible says. Everything that the Bible says, true believers believe it. We do not doubt it at all.
Really, it is a very solid belief that a Christian has when a child of God reads the Bible. We read about the sin nature of man and we read about the wrath of God upon our sin and we read that God has appointed a day in which He will judge the world and we read about His salvation plan, and everything that we read in the Bible we know is absolutely true. Absolutely! There is no doubt in the believer’s mind about anything that we read in the Bible. We can check it out and we can know what that the Bible is saying.
A lot of people make statements about what the Bible says that are not true, and we do not believe them. We do not believe any doctrine that anyone puts forth, but when we go to the Bible and we study the Scriptures and we compare Scripture with Scripture and we check out the things that we are hearing and then we come to a truth, we believe it absolutely and completely.
There is no doubt in the believer’s mind that God gave us this Book and that His Word is true and faithful. We trust in His Word. So faith is this “evidence of things not seen,” because we do not “see” God. We do not “see” the Kingdom of God. We do not “see” Heaven. We do not “see” all of these things that we are reading about, at least with our natural eyes, but we “see” them with eyes of faith—the faith that God has given us to recognize that the Word of God is true.
The word “evidence” in Hebrews 11:1 is found in only one other place in the New Testament and that is in 2 Timothy 3:16, where it says:
All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof…
Or, “for evidence.” So this word “reproof” is the same Greek word for “evidence” in Hebrews 11:1. “All Scripture…is profitable for evidence” to believe the “things not seen.” We can understand it in this way.
As we come to the Bible, God is giving us 66 books of evidence to verify the facts of what He is saying concerning His invisible Kingdom, concerning the Spirit that He gives His people, concerning all of the things written in the Word of God. We have the Scriptures themselves as evidence to confirm these things, and they do work that way. The Bible does work in this way.
When we begin reading the Bible, we see how God has written us His Word. He made statements 3500 years ago and then He made more statements a thousand years before Christ, up until the first century AD, and all of this Scripture fits together perfectly and harmonizes. It is like the pieces of a gigantic puzzle that all fall into place, and this is just confirmation and strong evidence that the Bible is as it claims to be, the Word of God.
The Bible is telling us the truth about everything that it testifies to, so the elect of God are convinced by the Bible itself concerning “things not seen.” For instance, this is how we actually live our lives. If we turn to 2 Corinthians 4:17-18, we read there:
For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
So we “look” at things that are not seen, and this is why the world wonders about the child of God. The unsaved do not understand, because they look at things that are seen. They can touch, they can feel, and they can sense the things around them—they will believe in them. But when you are talking about spiritual things, you are talking about things that are invisible and that you can not see with the human eye, they wonder, “You are going to base your life on that? You are going to lean and trust on a God whom you have never seen and on a Book that puts forth all kinds of things about eternity to come? You can not see any of it, and you are going to trust in that?”
Of course, the believer, without hesitation, says, “Yes! Yes! We trust, not because we have any great faith of our own, but because God has given us faith. He has given us ‘eyes to see.’” This is the language that the Bible talks about. He has given us “eyes to see” things that are spiritually true, so we can keep our thoughts on “things above” and we can look at “invisible things” and see them through the eyes of faith.
So this is really what Hebrews 11 is going to discuss, as God gets into all these men of old, the prophets of long ago, who lived their lives because they saw things that could not be seen. They trusted in things that the natural man can not trust in because natural man can not verify them through his senses.
Going back to Hebrews 11:2, it says:
For by it the elders obtained a good report.
There is that word “it” again, and this is referring to “faith,” the faith of God, the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ.
For by God’s faith the elders obtained a good report.
The Greek word for “report” is “martureo,” and it is related to the English word “martyr.” When people die for their faith, we call them “martyrs.” “Martureo” is one Greek word but it is translated as four English words in this verse. “Obtained a good report” is all that one Greek word that is related to the English word “martyr.” It is also translated as “bare witness” or “testify.” For by the faith of God, the elders “bare witness” or “testified” to the truth of God, to the Word of God. They obtained “a good report.”
It is also the same word that we see in Hebrews 11:4, where it speaks of Abel and says that he “obtained witness.” “Obtained witness” is the same Greek word “martureo” that is translated as “obtained a good report.”
This word is also found later in Hebrews 11:39, where it says:
And these all, having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise:
This is referring to the resurrection of their physical bodies.
So all of God’s people “obtain a good report.” They have become witnesses for the Gospel. Through their lives, they have testified that they have believed God. They believed God, of course, after God gave them the Spirit, because that is when they are given the “fruit of the Sprit,” one of which is faith, whereby the one drawn by God begins to believe Him.
Then we read in Hebrews 11:3:
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
This is a good example of how the world operates and how God’s people operate, because the world tries to figure out where it came from. It works overtime in trying to explain where everything came from, so it develops a teaching like evolution, just to try to explain that the world has evolved and that there was no God in the beginning who spoke and created the world and who made everything that we see. The world believes instead that all of this came through natural processes over a long period of time. I do not know what they are up to now, hundreds of millions of years or maybe even billions of years that these things evolved into over eons. Suddenly, we have the world that we see all around us with people who evolved along with everything else.
Yet the Bible is absolutely plain and clear. It says, “And God said” and He created. “God said” and it came into being, so the things which are seen were made by things which are not seen and which do not appear, as God just simply used His Word, the power of His Word, to bring the world into being.
If we turn to Colossians 1:16, this is speaking of Jesus, and we read:
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him:
So here is one verse that explains everything about this world, where the world came from and where all of the galaxies came from and all of the universe that is out there. God just simply tells us that Jesus made it. Jesus made it. He is the Creator. He is the Word that God spoke, and the world came into being.
It is not really all that complicated, and God’s people recognize this and understand this. Through faith we understand “that the worlds were framed by the Word of God.” So we do not try to come up with any other solutions, because this explains it perfectly.
Moving on to Hebrews 11:4, we read:
By faith Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.
“Abel offered unto God a more excellent sacrifice.” We read about this account in Genesis 4. Basically, God is pointing to these two men, these two brothers, the first two who were born, and He is saying that they both offered sacrifice but that Abel’s sacrifice was “more excellent.” Let us turn back to Genesis 4, where we read about this. It says in Genesis 4:1-5:
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD. And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering: but unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
So they both brought offerings, and there was nothing wrong with the offerings that they brought, as far as Cain and Abel. Both offerings were acceptable to God. We read in other places in the Bible to bring a meat offering or a flour offering or an animal sacrifice. All of those offerings were acceptable. So it was not the type of offering that Cain brought that caused God not to have “respect” towards it, but rather it was something else.
If we turn to 1 John 3:11-12, we read:
For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.
You see, this is the reason that Cain slew Abel, “because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.”
Is this not saying then that it was the type of offering that they brought and that there was something wrong with Cain’s offering but nothing wrong with Abel’s? Is this not what God is talking about?
Actually, no, that is not the point. We know this because Abel’s works are implied in this verse to be “righteous.”
In the first class today, we just went over how we can not become saved by our own works. We can not do the least thing to get right with God, and God gives us many examples of this in the Bible.
Cain could not be accepted because of his works, nor could Abel be accepted based on the type of offering that he made to God. God would not accept either of them if they came trusting in that.
Actually, it does tells us why God refused Cain’s offering, why “He had not respect” unto it, because Cain was trusting in the offering itself. Cain heard or knew that he was to bring an offering. We do not know exactly how they knew that they had to bring offerings. Probably from their parents, as God did explain in Genesis 3 about the sin that entered in and that there would be the seed of the woman that would come, which was an early reference to the Messiah, the Lord Jesus.
They knew as a result of their sin that there had to be an offering made, there had to be something to appease God’s anger. The offering is presented to God, and Cain trusts in the work involved in presenting his offering. So God tells Cain that He does not respect or desire the offering that he brought.
God tells us in the Psalms, “Sacrifice and offering Thou didst not desire…burnt offering and sin offering hast Thou not required.” This was not what He was looking for, yet He required it of Israel. He required it of His people to offer those things in order to paint a picture of what they represented, which was the coming Messiah, Christ, who would be the perfect sacrifice for the sins of His people.
This is why Abel’s works were righteous, His works, because he was not trusting in the animal sacrifice. He was trusting in the coming Messiah. He was trusting that one day God would become man and enter into the human race and bear upon Himself the sins of His people and die for those sins and pay the penalty for those sins and that the Messiah would perform the work necessary to save all of the children of God.
Abel trusted in that work—in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. It was not his own works. This is why God can say that Abel’s works were righteous; it is actually God’s work in going to the Cross. It is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We also read here in Hebrews 11:4, in the last part of the verse:
…by which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts: and by it he being dead yet speaketh.
“He being dead yet speaketh.” This is referring to Abel, because Abel was slain. Abel was slain early on.
Adam and Even fell into sin. Then they had children. Cain was born first. Abel was born second. It would have been several years later when they are making offerings, so we can assume that they were at least over 18, maybe they are in their 20’s. We do not know how old they were, but it would have been several years from the point of creation and the fall into sin when they are bringing this offering.
It is interesting that God is going to make a distinction between Cain and Abel. God is going to let them know that he favors one and does not favor the other, that He has respect to one of them and not the other. God is going to cause a separation to take place between these two brothers that was not there previously. Previously, they had been living together. They were under the same roof. We can speculate that because they were sons of Adam and Eve, they must have lived very closely together.
But now God is going to come and through this offering and making it known which one He had respect to and which one He did not have respect to, there will be a split between the two brothers that never was there before, that never occurred before.
We also see in Hebrews 12 that there is one more reference to Abel. It says in Hebrews 12:24:
And to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the blood of sprinkling, that speaketh better things than that of Abel.
Remember, Hebrews 11:4 said, “He being dead yet speaketh.” What is he speaking? Here in Hebrews 12, God is referring to Jesus and His blood, His blood “that speaketh better things than that of Abel,” indicating again that Abel is speaking—but it is not as great, it is not as wonderful as what the blood of Jesus declares.
What does Jesus’ blood declare? It declares that there is forgiveness for sin. It declares that sins can be washed away. It declares that we can become pure in God’s sight. It declares that we can have salvation.
So this is better than what Abel’s blood is declaring. If we turn back to Genesis 4:6-10, we read:
And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him. And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
There is the “voice” of Abel. There is where he “yet speaketh.”
From the very beginning of time practically, in the first few decades of earth’s history, we have Abel, a child of God whose works were righteous because he was trusting in the work of the Lord Jesus, who was slain by his brother Cain. Cain’s works were evil, yet God has dealings with both of them. God has really made Himself known to both brothers, and now there is a split, as Cain will slay Abel and Abel’s blood will begin to cry unto the Lord “from the ground.” It is going to cry unto the Lord.
I was looking at the idea of blood in the Bible. God has a lot to say about “innocent blood,” the spilling of “innocent blood.” It is really horrendous.
I think that we have lost a lot of ability to realize how horrible and terrible murder is, when we live in a world that sheds man’s blood so easily. There are hundreds of murders in Philadelphia alone, and that is just one city. If you multiply this across the country, there are thousands and tens of thousands of murders, maybe yearly—I do not know the figure. Then, of course, across the world, it is just multiplied even more.
Man began to shed blood, as Cain slew Abel, and man has continued to shed blood. All through the history of the world, we find the sin of murder, of taking someone’s life. Yet, we read of laws in the Bible where you could not have “innocent blood” shed upon your land. There was a law where if you found a man dead in a field and he was slain, they would measure to the nearest city. The city that was nearest had to come and offer sacrifice for the blood of that man, or else “innocent blood” would have been accounted to that city.
God is very careful to make sure that all blood is accounted for. Right after the flood, we read in Genesis 9, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.” So there is retribution. There is payment to be made for the shedding of “innocent blood.” There must be also shedding of the one who took the life.
Yet, here is Abel, his blood is crying unto God from the ground from 13,000 years ago. For 13,000 years, Abel’s voice has been speaking, his blood has been crying to God for vengeance. “Avenge me, oh Lord! Avenge me!” This is not an understatement.
If we turn to Revelation 6:9, it says:
And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:
This is a related word to the word “martyr,” where we read that they “obtained a good report.” It is very closely related to that Greek word.
We continue in Revelation 6:10:
And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?
You see, this is the souls of the saints, the souls of those whom God has saved prior to the time of the Great Tribulation. We can know this for sure because it says in Revelation 6:11:
And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season…
This “little season” is the time when Satan is loosed. It is the “little season” of the time of the Great Tribulation. Yet all of the blood of the saints of God, the believers, has been crying out, “How long, O Lord” until you “avenge our blood?” This is because God gave a Law, “Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed.”
There is penalty. There is judgment. There must be the wrath of God that comes down upon it, yet it seems that from Abel to Zacharias there has been no payment for that blood?
If we turn to Matthew 23, Jesus was speaking to the scribes and Pharisees. We read in Matthew 23:34-35:
Wherefore, behold, I send unto you prophets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify; and some of them shall ye scourge in your synagogues, and persecute them from city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar.
You see, what Jesus is saying is that upon the scribes and Pharisees—and they are just representative of the leaders in the churches and congregations who are teaching falsely—upon you and this generation, the generation of evil, will come all the blood shed from Abel to Zacharias.
It is kind of nice in the English language because it is from “A” to “Z,” but it does not work out that way in the Greek. In the Greek, it is Alpha and Omega. But in the English, from Abel to Zacharias, “A” to “Z,” and this is exactly what is meant—from the beginning to the end.
The problem is that Zacharias was slain hundreds of years before Christ came. Hundreds of years before Jesus came, Zacharias was slain. So how can it be an all-encompassing statement, as it is obviously meant to be? How can it cover all of history?
It can because it is from Abel, the beginning, the first, to Zacharias, the last. We find the answer when we go to 2 Chronicles 24, where we read about Zechariah (Zacharias) being slain. We read in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22:
And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest…
In Matthew 23, it said that he was the “son of Barachias.” We can understand that he is like a grandson or even a great-grandson of Jehoiada because Jehoiada was a very aged man by this time. God sometimes does this, where He will not refer to an immediate father but it could be someone in the line of that individual.
So Barachias in all probability is the immediate father, and he is mentioned in Matthew 23 and also in Luke. But here in 2 Chronicles, Jehoiada, his grandfather or great-grandfather, is in his line, so God says:
And the Spirit of God came upon Zechariah the son of Jehoiada the priest, which stood above the people, and said unto them, Thus saith God, Why transgress ye the commandments of the LORD, that ye cannot prosper? because ye have forsaken the LORD, he hath also forsaken you. And they conspired against him, and stoned him with stones at the commandment of the king in the court of the house of the LORD. Thus Joash the king remembered not the kindness which Jehoiada his father had done to him, but slew his son. And when he died, he said, The LORD look upon it, and require it.
“Require it”—the blood is speaking. The blood is crying out, “There must be vengeance! Where is the retribution? Where is the justice?” If blood has been spilt, then the blood of the murderer must also be spilt.
The interesting thing here is in 2 Chronicles 24:15, where it tells us:
But Jehoiada waxed old, and was full of days when he died; an hundred and thirty years old was he when he died.
You see, Jehoiada was the priest (Note: in the audio record the speaker inadvertently referred to Jehoiada as the king, but he intended to say “priest”) who raised up the boy king. He hid him from wicked Athaliah who murdered her whole family except for that king. All the days of Jehoiada, we read that King Joash did right in the sight of the LORD.
But as soon as Jehoiada the priest dies, and he dies at 130, then Joash just goes his own way. He follows other counsel and he murders someone in the line of Jehoiada the priest who had preserved his life. He had greatly benefited from Jehoiada and yet he turned so wicked that he would even have one of his descendants slain by stoning.
So God is letting us know that all of these acts do not go unheeded. They do not go unpunished forever—from Abel to Zachariah. How Zachariah ties in with the end is by the age of Jehoiada the priest, which is 130. This relates to 10 x 13 or 13,000 years of history, which is when we believe that the Great Tribulation began in 1988. This is when, in a figure, the one who was causing those in the churches to go the right way, the Holy Spirit of God, the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, who was in the midst of the congregations so that the congregations behaved themselves somewhat uprightly, when the Holy Spirit comes out of the midst, then they do wickedly. They slay the Lord’s people. They kill the children of God, not physically but by their teachings, by other kinds of gospels and doctrines. They are killing God’s people, and yet God’s people are crying out for vengeance.
Remember what it says in Luke 21, which is a chapter dealing with the Great Tribulation, “For these be the days of vengeance.” “These be the days of vengeance,” when the Great Tribulation has gotten underway and God has loosed Satan to destroy the churches and congregations. Why? Vengeance. Vengeance.
Look at Revelation 18. We are familiar with this chapter, but look at the last verse of the chapter, speaking of Babylon which we know represents the corporate body, the church. We read in Revelation 18:24:
And in her was found the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon the earth.
Do you see how God is tying it all together in “Babylon”? “Babylon” is the churches and congregations. “Babylon” consists today of the Presbyterian and the Baptist and the Episcopal and the Catholic—whatever church you want to name. They, spiritually, have become “Babylon,” and they are guilty of the blood of all of the people of God.
Is this fair? Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees that they were guilty of the “blood of Abel” and of all the blood, even the “blood of Zacharias,” even though it had been hundreds of years before when Zacharias had actually been slain. Remember, Jesus said at another time, “Truly ye bear witness that ye allow the deeds of your fathers: for they indeed killed them.”
So it is all in that line, all in the generation of evil, up until our day, where now God is going to judge “Babylon.” He is going to judge the churches and congregations, and in so doing, He is now, in a sense, finally hearing that cry of all the saints of God for blood.
Let us turn back to Genesis 4, and we will close this study after looking at this. Going back to a verse that we have already read, Genesis 4:3:
And in process of time it came to pass…
If you look in an Interlinear Bible and you look at the Hebrew, this is better translated and actually has to be translated in this manner:
And at the end of days…
It is not “process of time,” but it is the word “end” and you do find the word “days.” It is “at the end of days” when what is going to transpire in Genesis 4, where Cain rises up and slays his brother, that God is going to judge Cain.
God tells Cain, “a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth” and “when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength.” There will be no fruit. There will be no fruit for Cain anymore, and it is looking ahead to our day when those who are joined with Cain, spiritually speaking, go “in the way of Cain.” They are unsaved, they are “carnal,” they are “in the flesh,” and they will rise up and also slay the people of God. God will judge the churches and congregations, as “judgment must begin at the house of God,” and they will no longer bear fruit. They will no longer have any fruit within the church.